Debian 10 "Buster" released

More than twenty years ago I came in touch with Linux for the first time. While being a trainee, I developed the interest in the operating system our company handled mail-, webserver- and proxy-services with. Debian 2.0 (released in 1998) was the preferred platform then and has accompanied me throughout the years. It's hard to believe that more than two decades have passed but today, we celebrate even the tenth edition of Debian Linux: "Buster", successor of "Stretch" has been released!

25 months of development between the Debian Security Team and the Debian Long Term Support-Team finally resulted in the latest stable version named "Buster" which will get five years of maintenance support due to the cooperation of both teams named here. As demand has changed, the number of Desktop Managers in Debian have changed as well: Years ago, KDE and Gnome where the only choices. Debian 10 comes with Cinnamon 3.8,, GNOME 3.30, KDE Plasma 5.14, LXDE 0.99.2, LXQt 0.14, MATE 1.20 and Xfce 4.12. You see there should be plenty of possibilities to suit your desktop to your personal needs!

Debian 10 "Buster" KDE-Information

"Buster" always comes with the Wayland-Display-Server instead of Xorg. According to Debian, Wayland features a more simple and modern platform which also serves the security-aspect. Xorg is still pre-installed and may be chosen just before the start of your user session. As we mention "security", the framework AppArmor is now pre-installed and activated as well to reduce the action scope of single applications. Besides, all "apt"-methods (except of cdrom, gpgv and rsh) may use the "seccomp-BPF"-sandboxing technology. This time, the https-method for "apt" is implemented straight from the beginning and does not need to be installed additionally.

Debian 10 "Buster" KDE-Desktop

Since Debian 7 ("Wheezy") the support for UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) was introduced and has drastically evolved in "Buster": Secure Boot is now supported on architectures basing on amd64, i386 and arm64 and should work with all devices which have this feature enabled out of the box. Driverless printing is also a new topic in Debian 10: cups and cups-filter-packages are installed by default. Network printing queues and IPP-printers are configured and administrated by cups-browsed automatically so that the user can refuse to use "unfree" vendor-drivers.

Changes have also been made in connection with the network-filter: By default, Debian 10 uses the nftables-framework. Since the release of iptables 1.8.2, the packages did already contain the iptables-nft as well as the iptables-legacy-modules. Of course you may still change the preferred network filter by using the alternatives-system.

Debian 10 "Buster" Dolphin File Explorer

To sum it up, more than 62 percent of all packages being used in "Stretch" have been updated, amongst them:

Apache 2.4.38

BIND DNS-Server 9.11

Chromium 73.0

Emacs 26.1

Firefox 60.7 (package firefox-esr)

GIMP 2.10.8

GNU Compiler Collection 7.4 and 8.3

GnuPG 2.2

Golang 1.11

Inkscape 0.92.4

LibreOffice 6.1

Linux 4.19 series

MariaDB 10.3

OpenJDK 11

Perl 5.28

PHP 7.3

PostgreSQL 11

Python 3 3.7.2

Ruby 2.5.1

Rustc 1.34

Samba 4.9

systemd 241

Thunderbird 60.7.2

Vim 8.1

More than 59.000 other ready-to-deploy software-packages created out of 29000 source packages

Finally, all you need to to now is to fetch the latest installation medium tailored to suit your needs at https://debian.org. The images are uploaded and may be fetched so head on to update your system - or get to learn Debian as a new user!